Since I was a kid, I always enjoy open source communities. I have always been fascinated by folks hackers around the world who collaborate to create software and, in some way, improve the world. All that I learned is thanks to open source communities.

At 16 years old, I did a talk about the power of the community at LinuxDay organized from the Napoli LUG:

Since when I work in the IT, every year I always postponed join the FOSDEM, but this year I decided that it had to be the year. So FOSDEM 2024 has been the my first edition of this conference.

For those who aren’t aware of the FOSDEM, this is the official description (and completely true) of the event:

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don’t need to register. Just turn up and join in!

Talks

If you ever joined the FOSDEM, you may know that the FOSDEM is organized in dev rooms. Each devroom covers a topic (eg: JavaScript, Rust, retrocomputing).

One of the hints I had is to pick a dev room with the most talks you could be interested in because when the day starts, rooms fill up quickly. When they are complete, you have to wait for someone to leave the room: so if you decide to change room every session, there is the risk that you will find the rooms always full, and you will spend the entire day around the campus to do queues (even if stay in a queue is a great way to do networking).

First Day

On the first day, I joined the JavaScript devroom. All the talks were super interesting, especially:

• How Tansu, a Reactive Agnostic Library, Simplifies Widget Creation for AgnosUI
• Your web app is taking up too much RAM. Let’s fix it!
• Unraveling JavaScript’s Heart: Mastering the Event Loop for Peak Performance
• Building your own JavaScript runtime with Rust
• MessageFormat: The future of i18n on the web

For dinner, I went with some friends to a restaurant to taste “Cozze con la panna” (Mussels with cream). I was really curious, because this kind of combo is pretty unusual in Italy.

After that, we went to the Delirium Café where there were plenty of folks who was in Bruxelles for the FOSDEM. 🍻

Second Day

On the second day, mainly I joined the Designing Futures of FOSS Content Management with the Open Website Alliance devroom and Matrix devroom where I had the opportunity to join two talks from two collegues from Automattic:

• Shaping the Future: Investing Wisely in Long-Term Open Source Development with “Five for the Future”
• Embracing Matrix for Enhanced Communication: Migrating the WordPress Community from Slack to Matrix

Also, it is worth to mention:

• Let’s talk Matrix between Governments and Citizens
• Open source leadership at scale, how 1300+ people improved Drupal’s multilingual features

During the afternoon, I participated in a live recording session of my favorite podcast about coding and software, GitBar – I’m pretty sure that the episode will be out soon!

Talks that I didn’t have the chance to watch

With more of 800 talks, there is the chance that one interesting talk overlap with another one or the room is full and you didn’t have the chance to join the room. This is the list of talks that I will watch online (maybe more)

• How to Chart your own Career Path in Open Source – Panel Discussion
• Will the first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) instance be free or open-source software?
• Learning from disaster response teams to save the internet
• You too could have made curl!
• So you think you know Git
• Version control post-Git

Similar to when I join a WordCamp, joining the FOSDEM reminded me of the incredible power of community that I first experienced as a teenager.

It was truly a wonderful and inspiring experience to meet in real life the individuals whose content and tweets have played a pivotal role in advancing my career 🚀